Numerous information providers are present on communication networks (such as the Internet) providing all kinds of services. Many organizations have mission critical data in databases such as SQL databases or NoSQL databases. The size of those databases tend to vastly increase each year and at the same time the number of served transactions grow at an accelerating rate, according to an even steeper curve. Furthermore, the complexity of the database and its relations often deepens. By the increase of interactivity and the rising number of users (e.g. Internet users), there is an ever increasing demand for more database capacity and capabilities. However, currently, existing solutions have several drawbacks including their lack of performance.
Many larger organizations are challenged to maintaining existing or delivering higher levels of database performances. For example, organizations often have numerous legacy tools and applications which communicate with SQL databases. Adding to this are multiple third-party applications available for direct SQL usage. As a result, from a technical perspective, it is neither desirable nor feasible for some organizations to deploy other databases than SQL. However, the SQL standard is relatively old and does not support an object oriented and/or functional programming approach. The performance may at times be limited by the row oriented approach employed by SQL as well as the dynamic relation of information elements that often take place upon the request of information elements.
Capacity and performance are key factors when it comes to organizations' bottom-line. Slow web sites or poorly executed queries often result in less traffic, dissatisfied customers or a negative user experience, therefore ultimately hurting the bottom-line. The problem is universal regardless of the type of industry such as retail, finance, insurance, government, gaming, health-care. Organizations in these industries will sooner or later face the problem as competition leaps ahead.
IT departments face the problems in multiple ways: external web sites, internal databases or complex relationship queries. For example, to keep database demand under control, IT departments are forced to increase database capacity by deploying more powerful servers. Sometimes the cost for database licenses increase linearly with the number of CPUs used.
Application developers are facing a number of problems when they handle digital objects in data sources. For example, application providers need to write code manually that reflects objects stored in data sources. They often need to write communication adapters to convert from the underlying data sources to modern program languages objects/functional and programming paradigms.
Recently, functional programming models have been added to object oriented languages (such as the Java programming language). These functional additions make it possible for application developers to express what they want to do and not so much how it is done. However, the programming model for many databases (for example SQL databases) is fundamentally different from any functional view and so there is no obvious mapping from the functional view to the programming models used by many databases.
Applicants have identified that there are several problems in the present way of handling objects and functions in a communication network, searching for, inserting, changing or deleting specific digital objects and subsequently obtaining them because of several reasons described above and hereunder. In view of the foregoing, it may be understood that there are significant problems and shortcomings associated with existing approaches for obtaining and storing digital objects.